More Than Words Can Ever Tell

Jennifer (Hobaugh) Lansbury was born in 1960 into a U.S. Marine Corps family while her father was stationed at Parris Island, in Beaufort, South Carolina. Many years later, she earned her PhD in history from George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. Her book, A Spectacular Leap: Black Women Athletes in Twentieth-Century America (University of Arkansas Press, 2014), follows the stories of six athletes to explore the racism, sexism, and classism that twentieth-century black women athletes fought against. More Than Words Can Ever Tell is her second book. She resides in Springfield, Virginia, just outside Washington, D.C.

What is the secret to life-long love? Why do some marriages stand the test of time while others fail? In 2014 in the wake of her dad's death, historian Jennifer Lansbury discovered a cache of letters written by her parents over half a century earlier when her father, compliments of the U.S. Marine Corps, was separated time and again from his "dearest, darling wife" and young children. In reading through them, she discovered that the foundation of her parents' beautiful 58-year marriage was in this pile of letters, and came to see her mother and father in a totally new way, as a young couple separate from who they were as her parents. Enter their world as she uses their letters, coupled with memory of her growing up, to tell the story of her parents and their love, her family, and the separations they endured against the backdrop of the times in which they lived. Journey with them­-from their North Carolina beginnings during the Great Depression and World War II; through her father's brutal experience of the Korean War; to the island of Okinawa, rocky clime of Argentia, Newfoundland, and Marine bases of the South during the burgeoning 1950s and turbulent 1960s-as Becky and George use sixteen years of love letters to hold together a relationship and family torn apart by war and devotion to military service.¿